Intelligent cars
Fully autonomous vehicles for everyday use in the future are fantasy, but
improved driver aids are evolving and here to stay says E&T

Ediror: Giannis Zacharakis
Republication from the Technology and Engineering Magazine

Over the past 10 years, automatic control systems in cars have made a huge
contribution to safety on our roads. By taking on some of the burden off the
human controller, and reacting faster and more precisely, they have allowed
a growing number of road users to mitigate the effects of accidents or avoid
them altogether.They’ve brought with them a shift in emphasis from
‘passive’ safety, as in protection from an accident, to ‘active’ safety, as in
prevention, with carmakers having a stated vision of a ‘zero-accident’ future
in their cars.According to a cross-section of industry insiders, by 2020 a
typical new car will be even safer and more convenient to drive, offering the
driver better information about the external environment via integrated
systems of varying levels of autonomy.“By 2020, a key technology will be
automatic emergency braking,” says Matthew Avery, crash and safety
research manager at the UK’s Motor Insurance Repair Research Centre
(better known as Thatcham), which carries out research into improving
vehicle safety. “The technology will appear initially in high-end models then
cascade down, as happens now with electronic stability control, for
example.”Like any control technology, sensors play a vital role, and systems
exploiting a technique called ‘sensor fusion’ - merging, say, video with radar
to provide a more detailed view of the immediate environment - are in the
pipeline. One early indicator here is technology being introduced this year
by Volvo, called Pedestrian Safety, in its new S60. The system consists of a
radar unit in the car’s grille, a camera behind the inside rear-view mirror and
a central control unit. The radar detects objects and measures the distance to

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them; the camera determines what type of objects they are and allows the
system to monitor pedestrian movement patterns. The system is a step on
from Volvo’s existing City Safety technology, which warns drivers of an
impending collision with another vehicle and will brake the car
automatically if the driver fails to respond.Of course, Volvo is not the only
carmaker working on this technology - according to Ingobert Lassrich,
global active safety manager at General Motors, “all OEMs are doing
it”.Mercedes-Benz, for example, sees the concept in terms of inherent
reliability. “Although, individually, the chance of an error with each system
is rare, the likelihood that both will simultaneously fail to recognise the same
object or erroneously ‘create’ an obstacle is much rarer still,” it says. “This
gain in sensor accuracy allows increasingly ‘responsible’ tasks to be
assigned to sensor-based systems.”Thatcham’s Avery says another sensing
technique to watch for in the future will be stereo camera imaging, as the
parallax effect does away with the need for radar systems, which are also
more expensive. Mercedes, again for example, has been working on such a
system, developing algorithms to analyse the video feed and allow colored
pixels to be displayed on a greyscale image according to the distance of
objects from the camera - green, orange and red for far away, middle ground
and directly in front.
Driver support
Another key emerging set of technologies, says Avery, comes under the
heading of driver support or assistance. Toyota, for example, already offers
such a system, which it describes as, “helping the driver in basic driving
tasks... reducing the driver’s mental and physical load [to make] it possible
for the driver to react in the best way possible whenever the risk of an
accident is present.”It’s perhaps here that some of the most intriguing
possibilities lie for the typical car of 2020, as it brings with it scope for
control and automation across entire traffic networks. One recent system that
offers a pointer here - again, from Mercedes - is Predictive Cruise Control
(PCC), unveiled in March 2009. Aimed at least initially at the haulage
industry, it automatically adjusts a truck’s speed along its route, using GPS
and digitised 3D map data of the route to adjust engine output and gear ratio
in line with approaching uphill and downhill gradients. Another key area,
according to Avery, will be Intelligent Speed Adaptation, which constantly
monitors a vehicle’s speed and the local speed limit, and takes action when

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the vehicle is detected to be exceeding the speed limit. This would be either
by warning the driver to take action or by intervening automatically to
reduce the vehicle’s speed. Inappropriate speed is one of the top three killers
on our roads, says Avery, so ISA is eyed with keen interest by road safety
experts. Governments have tended to baulk at this degree of control over its
citizens, however, so at the moment the technology remains at the trial or
prototype stage. Also likely to be key in the future, he says, is the Intelligent
Transportation System (ITS). On a broader scale than ISA, but
encompassing it, ITS is a series of efforts aimed at cutting traffic congestion,
journey times, vehicle wear and fuel consumption. Some countries and cities
have already adopted elements of the technology - Chile and Australia, for
example, use it for electronic toll collection (ETC); London and Stockholm
are among those using it for congestion charging; and Japan has installed
sensors on its highways to notify motorists that a car is stalled ahead. As a
result, international standards are emerging, notably DSRC and 802.11.x
WAVE for ETC. Essential to all this will be the need for vehicles to
communicate and exchange information with each other and the
infrastructure. As Volvo puts it, “In principle, a future Volvo will be able to
‘speak’ to an oncoming vehicle, potentially communicating: “You and I are
about to collide head-on. If our drivers don’t react we have to do something
to avoid danger.”
Integrated safety management
The major challenge, Volvo says, is to find a common language between all
vehicles and the infrastructure. On this, head of safety strategy at Volvo
Cars, Jan Ivarsson, says, “We believe the key is to use communication
systems that are already available for other purposes. Adding traffic safety
communication to this existing architecture is far more sensible than trying
to invent and agree on a completely new ‘language’.” Volvo won’t be
drawn, however, on what that common existing ‘language’ might be. What
is generally agreed is that these discrete systems and technologies will
undergo integration. Toyota has started promoting its Integrated Safety
Management Concept (ISMC), which will combine driver support with
various active and passive safety systems. And in the longer term, Volvo
says, “The auto industry will see an integration of autopilot-type support
systems similar to those now in industries such as aviation and the process
industry.”The prospect of fully autonomous cars, however, is unlikely. “Car

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driving is an emotional thing,” says Markus Armbrust, manager of advanced
driver assistance and active safety systems at GM. “Drivers will not want to
give up all the fun, so it’s not GM’s intention to make a fully autonomous
car.”This appears to be a common view among car makers. As Avery says,
“I don’t know any manufacturer who thinks we’ll ever get to fully
autonomous driving - people will never want it.”Instead, car makers are
working towards systems that carry out some functions autonomously but
which are ultimately under driver control, as in Volvo’s autopilot scenario,
and which can also be switched off - as happens now with some traction
control systems on performance cars.The notion of an ‘autopilot’ implies
issues of redundant back-up systems, however, and here opinions vary.
Avery says, “They’d be too costly, and there’d be no need for them as they
wouldn’t be safety-critical systems.”GM’s Lassrich has a contrasting view.
“While autonomous systems will remain an option that can be switched off
if, say they’ve been damaged in an accident, redundancy will still be
necessary to give greater availability of system functionality. But there’ll be
redundancy only in those systems with critical functions.”This
acknowledges that, despite the vision of an accident-free future, people will
still have them, and one initiative to address this issue - at least in the EU - is
eCall, the pan-European in-vehicle emergency call system. Its aim is to
enable all vehicles in Europe - regardless of their make, country of
registration or location - to send a “distress” signal to the nearest point of
emergency services. The in-vehicle unit will be either an embedded GSMtype unit or cellphone with Bluetooth - there’s no final decision here yet and by 2020 the aim is that 92 per cent of all eCalls should reach the
emergency services. If there’s one thing that is certain about the cars of
2020, however, it is that they will be packed with technology. As GM’s
Armbrust says, “It’s our children who’ll be the drivers of 2020, and what
they’ll be asking for is just more technology.”